Somebody Needs a Nap

*this is in relation to language acquisition when NO special needs that are associated with hearing/language are involved.

When we adopted our youngest at the age of 2.5, she was speaking in full sentences in Cantonese.  She was fairly fluent, and fluent enough that the guides wanted someone with us in case she said something inappropriate that would get us looked at funny.  You know the whole 2.5 year old and newly adopted after living in a VERY loving foster family for 2 years…yeah.

So, in addition to her fluency in Cantonese, she is also incredibly stubborn.  Incredibly.  She decided that she would just not learn English and refused to communicate with us.  She lasted 6 months without really speaking ANY English words.  This meant that she really didn’t start speaking English until she was 3 years old.  We took her at that time to be evaluated by a speech therapist, and their response was that she was just stubborn.  She had GREAT receptive language, just was refusing to actually speak for us.

We waited 18 more months.  2 years home.  She was speaking but NO one could really understand her.  We understood her about half the time, and all others struggled.  I’m not talking about sentences, I’m talking we struggled to understand her say “water” or “juice” or “hurt” or “I want Mommy.” She would be dropping first and last sounds repeatedly.  She also tended to form sentences in very odd ways, going with a description of a word than an actual word which lead to difficulty in understanding her when combined with the articulation issues she had.  I attributed the description of a word in place of a word to a language acquisition problem where she didn’t quite have the vocabulary yet.   At this point we had her evaluated, and this time she was definitely behind in speech but not super bad.  She JUST made the cut off, and since it was us paying for it, they’d give her therapy.  In a school situation or early intervention they would have told us no.   After about 6 months of therapy she was doing great, and we really could understand her a LOT better.  She LOVED going to speech and working on it.  She still could not pick out a picture of a tiger for the picture that started with the sound of “t”…but we could understand her better.  Her speech therapist left, and she was moved to a bilingual specialist.  What followed was an education for me.  Our daughter was STILL dropping sounds at the beginning and ending of words, and had improved speech but was still not where I felt she should be.  The speech therapist told me that the sound errors she was making were a direct result of her being bilingual and it was her Chinese accent.  Thus, the speech therapist found it morally wrong to correct the accent.

I argued that it was NOT the accent, and that she was NOT bilingual.  No one was still speaking Cantonese with her.  She had not heard Cantonese for 2.5 years at this point.  Her speech at the age of 5 was that of a 3 year old.  I was concerned so I questioned the therapist and asked her to RESEARCH internationally adopted children and language acquisition and what was appropriate for that.  She promised, but the next week she reiterated what she had said previously and dropped our daughter from speech.  I was furious because she admitted she had NOT looked up anything regarding speech and internationally adopted children and how THAT is different from bilingual children’s language acquisition.

This led to my education.  Our children have what is called interrupted language or disrupted language acquisition.   It means that they were hearing one language exclusively for a period of time, and suddenly they are now hearing another language 100% of the time.  They have to STOP learning the first language and learn another first language.  They are not considered ESL, because for these young children English is NOT a second language to them because they do not remember their original first language.  The following links (and short blurbs) are the things I found most pertinent to internationally adopted children with speech language issues.

http://blog.asha.org/2011/01/11/assessing-language-development-in-internationally-adopted-children/

Regardless of the child’s birth language (Russian, Korean, or Chinese), research studies, clinical reports and case studies have provided evidence that children between the ages of 1 and 5 years old who are adopted from different countries demonstrate similar phonetic and phonological development with little first language interference (Glennen, 2007, 2009; Pollock, 2007). If a child demonstrates poor intelligibility or delayed articulation or phonological development, they should be referred for assessment by a speech-language pathologist familiar with research on internationally adopted children.

So, my Mommy gut was spot on with what I had looked for in my daughter’s case.

http://www.adopting.org/LanguageInAdopted.htm

Practically all adopted children will learn to speak English without an accent: there is solid scientific evidence that keeping or losing one’s accent is related to the developmental stage in language acquisition, where puberty (the period of becoming first capable of reproducing sexually) is the dividing line. Those who picked up a language before puberty tend to lose their accent, while after puberty the tendency is to keep an accent.

In this respect the majority of adopted children are not truly bilingual. Or they may be bilingual for only a short period of time. They are monolingual at arrival (Russian only) and after several months they are monolingual again, this time English only. There are exceptions with older adoptees (age 10 and up) particularly in twins and sibling groups, but only a few. It is my experience that a child between age four and eight will lose the bulk of her expressive Russian within the first 6 months in this country. Her receptive language for the purpose of simple communication may last longer, but eventually all functional use will disappear within the year if not in a few months.

So, my daughter at the age of 2.5 should LOSE her accent (as cute it as it was and even though I didn’t mind her having the accent).  By this point she had been home for 2.5 years.  She definitely should have lost all accents, and should definitely NOT be bilingual!

http://www.peds.umn.edu/iac/prod/groups/med/@pub/@med/documents/asset/med_49296.pdf

I can’t copy and paste the part on Speech/Language Development

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/Snedeker%20Geren%20Shafto%20Different%20Paths.pdf

Children who are internationally adopted as preschoolers encounter a language learning challenge that is similar to that of an infant: they are exposed to child-directed speech in the context of daily routines and must learn the new language to communicate with their families despite little access to bilingual informants and limited metalinguistic abilities (Gombert, 1992). However, these children are more cognitively advanced and physically mature than their infant counterparts and have already started to learn one language.   Our research compares language acquisition in internationally-adopted preschoolers and monolingual infants (Geren, Snedeker, & Ax, 2005; Snedeker et al., 2007; Snedeker et al., in press).

Our research differs from prior work on child second-language learning in two critical respects. First, we are  examining a population—internationally-adopted children—who are placed in a language-learning situation that more directly parallels that of infants.  Like infants they learn English in the context of playing, eating and arguing with their family members.   Because the children in our studies are being raised in monolingual English-speaking homes, they have little or no access to bilingual informants and no other language that they can use to meet their communicative needs. Thus, unlike the children in most second language studies, they do not maintain their birth language.  In a prior longitudinal study, we found that after two months, most adopted preschoolers were speaking entirely in English (Snedeker et al., in press).   Most of their parents reported that, by one year in the U.S., their child knew fewer than five words in their birth language.  By adulthood, internationally-adopted children do not have any conscious access to their birth language and show no cortical responses that distinguish it from an unfamiliar language (Pallier et al., 2003).

http://www.bgcenter.com/LanguageDevelopment.htm

(I didn’t copy any paste any parts from this one as it reiterated some of the above)

This next one was the big one to me.  We were there when she was 5 years old fighting for speech therapy because there were still issues.

http://pages.towson.edu/sglennen/25to30MonthsCharts.htm – Language developmental chart for children adopted when our daughter was adopted for language acquisition.

Children adopted at 30 months of age should catch up by age 5.  Preschool children who do not seem to be learning English quickly enough to close the gap by these ages should be considered language delayed and referred for speech and language services.

Our daughter should be 100% caught up to same age peers born to their parents here in the US.  She was exactly 30 months old at adoption, and at that time she basically stopped hearing any Cantonese.  She was language delayed, and showed it on the tests.   I knew that it would interfere with learning to read because it already was interfering with learning the sounds of letters.

http://ifonlyihadsuperpowers.blogspot.com/2008/12/language-disorders-in-children-adopted.html

Great blog post by a speech pathologist that also has internationally adopted children that goes over what to expect in language acquisition for parents adopting internationally.

http://www.talkingkids.org/2011/05/international-adoption-and-language_23.html

If your little one who was adopted internationally arrives home after the age of 24 months:

• She will probably lose her birth language quickly, within about three months home.
• You can expect a period of no language proficiency, where she is no longer fluent in her birth language but has not yet mastered her new language.  Both of you may experience frustration during this time. Prepare for this, expect this, and work through it. It will pass.
• She should start to develop a significant vocabulary in her new language within 3-6 months.
• She will likely acquire what is called Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) within one year home. This means that she’ll be able to use language to interact with others fairly well within one year home.
• Her Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), however, will take longer to emerge. CALP is the language she will need to succeed academically; it includes the more sophisticated vocabulary and language skills that allow her to work with written and spoken language to do things like compare, contrast, analyze, and infer. Depending on the age your child arrives home, it may take her up to 5-9 years to develop CALP.  This is an important point to remember because it suggests she may need extra support during her school years, even if it seems like she has mastered her new language during informal interactions with her family and her peers

I was fighting for speech therapy, and the speech therapists that were available to me who saw my child and assumed she was bilingual refused to work anymore with her.  It was so frustrating.  I was told she was 100% caught up.  At the age of 5, after being in our family for 2.5 years this was a story I related to the therapist:

Just this weekend, Princess1, who shares a room with our youngest daughter screamed in frustration, “Faith I can’t understand you.  Say it again!”  She repeated that twice.  I never heard Faith’s responses.

When you have a sibling who has LIVED in the same room as your struggling to speak child for 2.5 years, who often translates for us, and the therapists say it’s okay…it’s NOT okay.